Articles tagged with: movie reviews
Just as Samuel L Jackson could star in the biggest box office turd of all time and still come out clean on the other side, so vampire movies can be terminally cack and still stake a place in the hearts of cinemagoers. A case in point is the Blade trilogy that people liked so much we got a TV series full of lunatic plotlines and enough fake fangs to restock the NHS. Heck, even John Carpenter’s Vampires managed two sequels and that had James Woods AND Daniel Baldwin. They’re not all bad though, and while the prospect of a new bloodsucker flick starring master of the middle distance stare Josh Hartnett may not fill your soul with glee, we have some shocking news for you. 30 Days Of Night is actually not that bad.
Fact One: The Jackson 5 don’t blame it on sunshine, moonlight or bad times. They blame it on the boogie.
Fact two: The Carling Academy are bastards for charging nearly six quid for two shots of vodka.
Fact three: Elbow are the most underrated band in the UK.
With four albums under their belt, Elbow took their latest offering, The Seldom Seen Kid, on the road to showcase a few of the brilliant tracks that are featured on it, alongside mixing in a few older hits.
While talking to a friend who worked at the bar, she uttered the words “I’ve been told there like one of those miserable Radiohead-style bands, so I knew you’d be here tonight.”
Hmm, great that our music tastes have been pinned down, but slightly wrong about Elbow being the soundtrack to a suicidal cult's last few hours on earth.
The 80s gave birth to many great movie franchises; Ghostbusters, Terminator and The Never Ending Story. Okay, maybe not the last one, but we also got the recently reinvigorated Rambo franchise.
And as Sly Stallone recently shuffled his way back into the red bandana his little-known son is also flexing his muscles this side of the pond in the new film Son of Rambow.
Alas, the muscles flexed here are more the comedic type than steroid-induced tree trunks synonymous with Sly. This, however, presents us with one of the most fresh and surprising British films in years and a must-see film.
A part-time photographer’s uncle once said “With great power comes great responsibility.” In Hollywood studio terms this means “With lots of money comes no originality.”
Thus when a genre is successfully reinvented, like the Lord Of The Rings did with fantasy, studios will throw their wads of cash at the nearest fantasy book series hoping to squeeze more milky gold from the supple mass market teat.
Since the pitter patter of Hobbit feet was first heard, we’ve been treated to endless fantasy literary adaptations from the good - Harry Potter (Films 3-5), the bad - Chronicles of Narnia, and the scratch your eyes out its so damn ugly - Eragon. So it’s fair to say those furry-footed fucks have a lot to answer for!
We didn’t expect to enjoy The Spiderwick Chronicles and if we’re honest we only went to see it after seeing Seth Rogen’s name in the credits, whose gruff voice and bearish physique has had an effect on us that makes us feel uncomfortable inside. The experience though was enjoyable and had an almost nostalgic feel to the proceedings with a story that happily balances character drama with action and adventure more akin to what we grew up with than most of fantasy stories today that try to outdo the previous offering by enlarging the scope and action.
As we arrive at the entrance a reporter from a lesser publication, standing immediately in front of us, is struggling to convince the ticket booth lady he’s on the guest list. “But you’ve got to let me in! This was arranged a month ago! I love this band!”
The ticket booth lady looks at him as if he’s a mirror and she’s a cat who’s caught sight of her own reflection and says she can’t do a thing. Disgruntled man leans forward and whispers something. Ticket booth lady turns around and delegates the decision to a younger lady, who further delegates it to some hidden face in the next room. A minute passes. The queue behind disgruntled man grows in synch with his humiliation. Eventually the word comes back and he’s allowed in. He snatches the tickets and makes a grizzly bear sound as he storms inside. We approach the desk.
Man-child Will Ferrell playing an unconventional sportsman and lame lothario may not sound like the most original movie description, but it’s a case of 'if it ain’t broke don’t fix it,' with new movie Semi-Pro.
He attempts to bludgeon the audience into laughter by sheer force of personality. Petulant rants, violent tantrums and hysterical outbursts are what he’s good at and they are here in good measure. Ferrell fans will be delighted, but we can’t help feel we’ve seen this character before.
When Maxim gave two and a half stars to The Black Crowes' new album Warpaint, suspicions everywhere were raised pretty quickly.
Because, come on, two and a half stars out of five for an album by The Black Crowes? That's a bit bloody generous by anyone's standards.
Anyway, now that The Black Crowes have kicked up an almighty stink about Maxim's fake Warpaint review, the magazine has been forced into issuing a humiliating apology that's bound to harm its readership. After all, how are horny teenage boys expected to wank themselves into a sticky mess over pictures of Megan Fox in a bikini now they know that a blues-oriented hard rock jam-band got given an invented but probably accurate review in a previous issue?
The US Prison in Cumberland, MD isn't a perfect institution by any stretch of the imagination. We will say this about it though, of all the prisons we've ever been incarcerated in for three years or more at a time, Cumberland absolutely positively has the best tater tots we've ever tasted.
We were sceptical at first as the plate containing them slid under our half-ton steel door. They were piled in a sloppy pyramid next to green beans and some tough chicken. We pushed them around with our fork for a bit, then stabbed one to bring it up for a sniff. It smelled potato-ish, this was refreshing. Also, we individually spun a dozen of them on our right-pointy finger at the same time. This looked totally awesome. Then we used the tater tots to circumvent the in-house security system and knock out lots of guards until we gained our freedom.
Once outside the perimeters, we touched the sweet sweet tots to our lips and experienced a taste explosion unparallelled by any we'd ever experienced before. When we came to we realised this was because we'd coincidentally been tazed just then, but still. The tots were good, man.
Actually, none of that was true. We've never been to prison, and if we had we're sure we'd be permanently too scared to eat. Our potato review stands though, because you don't need to taste a tot to know it'd be delicious. It's kind of the way Maxim reviews albums apparently - without listening to them at all. It seems they did that to the Black Crowes just recently here.
